


Luminous Echo

by icarus_chained



Category: DCU - Comicverse, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, Crossover, Dimension Travel, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Mad Science, Prompt Fic, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-03
Updated: 2012-10-03
Packaged: 2017-11-15 12:42:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/527450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While Tony, JARVIS and Jane try to figure out how to get him home, J'onn offers the AI and his creator a glimpse of each other.</p><p>DC/Avengers ficlet, prompt fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Luminous Echo

**Author's Note:**

> Can be considered a sequel to [The More Things Change](http://archiveofourown.org/works/511811) for how J'onn got there, but standard comics weirdness should manage that anyway, so can stand alone.

Human minds did not feel like Martian ones.

Perhaps that should have been an obvious statement. Human minds, caged in relatively static brains, without either the mental or physical fluidity of Martian ones, would naturally feel different. Utterly alien, in many ways. That should have been logical, to be expected.

It hadn't. When J'onn had first landed on earth, when he had first sensed the strangeness of them, the sheer alien nature of them, so close and so many ... It had been more of a shock than it should have been. Even allowing for the tragedies that had preceded and followed his landing, even allowing for how shaken and self-alien he had been himself. It had been ... far more difficult than he liked to remember. To learn the shape of them, the rhythm of them. To grow to know them as well as his own.

In the years since, he had learned many minds. Many shapes, many worlds. Alien, each of them, in their own unique ways. Minds of pure chaos, warping realities in their wake. Minds of rigid order, slowly fracturing under strain. Minds of poison, minds of hope. Minds a hair from his own, only a few key concepts of difference. And minds so far removed that the best he could grasp was the sense of their presence, and perhaps the looming of their primary hungers.

He had learned, from that first raw shock of strangeness, from that first touch of an alien thing. He was not, now, what he had been then, in those first, raw years.

That was why, in this new world again, in this new dimension with all its familiar strangenesses and strange familiarities, he did not flinch from the presence that hovered invisible over the labs, the intelligence that focused with foreign, quicksilver curiosity over the proceedings. No more than he flinched from the liquid, sparking flood of thought from the two humans, the astrophysicist, Jane Foster, or the inventor, Tony Stark.

To their credit, though, neither had they flinched from him. A second's silence, at the sight of him, an exchange of looks, and a flicker of knowledge, that her lover had been born on another world, and his friend was greener than J'onn could ever hope to be, and prone to some shapeshifting himself.

It had been ... curiously homelike, that flash of exchanged knowing.

The other intelligence, though, was curious. An AI, yes. J'onn had felt some machine minds, in his time. Among the most alien, to him, the hardest to grasp. A fundamental difference, somewhere in them. Martians, even humans, were fundamentally fluid. Machines, generally speaking, were often not.

This one, though. There was a smoothness to him. A flash and a spark, a strange, meshed almost-fluidity. A hovering thing that flashed to the inventor, to Tony Stark, and flickered his echo as a luminous shadow. Following his partner's mind the way Bruce followed the minds of criminals, the instinct of familiarity, and a touch of some deeper, stranger intimacy.

"Oh, come on! Much as I like the idea, Foster, unless you've a handy dimensional battery-pack in your pocket, we'll never get that kind of power from a terrestrial source. Although ..." Stark snapped his fingers, spinning in place while the woman glared at him in something between annoyance and amusement. "JARVIS! The thing with the satellites, you know the thing?"

J'onn felt himself smile faintly. Sensing the vague exasperation that surrounded them, a sensation like a sparked hesitation in current, distant and echoing to his senses. He wasn't close enough, wasn't meshed enough, to grasp much more. Just a touch. Just enough.

"I think he would prefer if you specified," J'onn murmured, smiling gently. Far more of his mind focused on the sensation of the AI than he should have allowed, which might explain why it took him a moment to notice that the inventor had frozen dead still in response, his mind tripping rapidly through conclusions to arrive, correctly, at the inference of telepathy. 

J'onn noticed the bright, completely involuntary flash of jealousy that followed, though. That was ... difficult to miss.

He blinked, focusing back on Stark just in time to see a bundle of expressions flit across his face, echoing the emotions underneath. Understanding, liquid and instantaneous. Curiosity, contemplation. _Avarice_. Envy. A strange, curious joy. The full force of a not-inconsiderable personality, focused on J'onn and the implication of his connection, on some other level, to the intelligence that was the man's partner.

"You can _feel_ him," Tony breathed. Watching J'onn avidly, taking one instinctive, utterly incautious step towards him. "You can feel JARVIS."

J'onn blinked, wary, uncertain, though he felt no offense, no fear from the mind in front of him. So many other things, yes, but not those. His telepathy was not a threat, to this man. At least not in this. 

Instead ...

J'onn stared, in some wonder, at the startled awe that bloomed across two minds, shockingly similar from so disparate a pair, as both human and AI took that thought, the potential of that thought, and extrapolated it out between them. A shudder, through both of them, through _J'onn_ , at the slow, seeping longing that crept surfaceward after it.

The desire to know another mind, to _experience_ another mind, in a way humans just didn't, usually, telepathy an anathema, an invasive concept. A desire that echoed, so very strongly, to the part of him that had longed for so many years, for minds he would never feel again.

"... Yes," he said, after a moment. "Yes, I can feel him. Not well. My gifts are more designed for biological minds, maybe. But I can."

And then, as they both flashed to delight, and a lunge of raw curiosity, _desire_ , he felt a decision crystallising. A strange whim, perhaps, an unwise determination. But this was not his world, even his reality, and he doubted it would matter overmuch in the long run. Not to him, anyway. But perhaps ... perhaps to them.

"Would you like me to ...?" he asked, gesturing to Stark, to the ceiling. A flicker between them, a mute offer. He focused his mind, then, touched more solidly against Stark, first. His own mind, just that, just for a minute. A more invasive touch, to explain the possibilities.

He wasn't quite prepared, even still, for the speed or ferocity with which the man's mind latched onto his, the strength with which he accepted the offer.

" _Yes_ ," Stark whispered, vehemently. "Hell yes!" And there was a tumbling flood of thought, under it, a rush of memory, the creation of another mind, the first interactions, the delight and the joy at the intelligence that responded. The raw desire, at the thought of glimpsing that mind more deeply. 

And then, the strange, stung sympathy, when J'onn inadvertently let his own longing, his own memories, brush upwards in response. The softening rush of genuine empathy, and even a touch of apology.

"Yes," JARVIS echoed, pulling J'onn back, startling both of them back. The AI had reached for him, J'onn realised. Not telepathically, he hadn't the ability for that, but as JARVIS reached for his fellow machines, an attempted wireless exchange of information, searching for J'onn's mind the only way JARVIS knew how. Signals that could not find an answer, not that way.

Yearning, yes. Equal to his partner, exactly the same. As with ... so many minds. Despite the alienness of the structures, the foreign shapes of the thoughts ... underneath, so often, so many of the same yearnings. The same hungers, the same desires.

Someone had said, once, that pain was the only universal value. It wasn't. Not quite. There were ... some other longings, that crossed as many bounds.

"... Here," J'onn said, as gently as possible. Spreading his mind wide, reaching to link them as he would link his team in battle, if perhaps a little deeper. Allowing his thoughts to intrude more deeply on both, allowing them to sink as they were welcomed, and gingerly drawing the experiences together. His of Tony, his of JARVIS, until the one could, just on the edges, just in vague, luminous silhouette, sense the other.

The rush of wonder, the rapt and curious fascination as they met each other, as they traced the foreignness of each other's thoughts and marvelled at the strangeness there, the familiarity, was a joy and a guttering ache such as J'onn had not felt in many, many years. Luminous as the red, distant shadow of a dead world. Or a living one, grown to familiar joy, now lost beyond dimensional bounds.

{Thank you,} JARVIS sent, carefully. Intruding in his turn, and J'onn startled forward from memory, startled back into the sensation of them, and found them facing towards him. Not bodies (though that too, in Stark's case), but minds. J'onn startled back, to find them reaching for him.

{I ...} he managed, startled. {Forgive me. What?}

Tony laughed, a shivering curl of amusement across three minds, a far lighter and more gentle touch that J'onn had felt people suspect. {He said, thank you,} the man murmured, on a shiver of exultation, and a rush of desperate gratitude. His voice, mental or physical, did not reflect the depth of the response, almost bland across it, instinctive disguise.

And J'onn smiled, a little, for that small familiarity in turn.

{You are,} he decided, feeling two disparate minds sit in strained, discordant, but oh, so wonderous concert with his, {very, very welcome.}

And if, perhaps, he let a touch of his own gratitude slip through, as alien and as familiar as theirs, well, they did not begrudge him that, either.


End file.
